"This vision produced such a shock that I had no inclination to talk about it or to speak about it even to Stuart; but the impression it made upon me was too vivid to be easily forgotten; and so strongly was I affected by it that I have here written down the whole history, with the date, 19th December, and all the particulars, as they are now fresh before me. No doubt I had fallen asleep; and that the appearance presented so distinctly to my eyes was a dream, I cannot for a moment doubt; yet for years I had had no communication with G„ nor had there been anything to recall him to my recollection; nothing had taken place during our Swedish travels either connected with G. or with India, or with anything relating to him or to any member of his family. I recollected quickly enough our old discussion and the bargain we had made. I could not discharge from my mind the impression that G. must have died, and that his appearance to me was to be received by me as a proof of a future state, yet all the while I felt convinced that the whole was a dream; and so painfully vivid, so unfading was the impression, that I could not bring myself to talk of it, or to make the slightest allusion to it".

In October, 1862, Lord Brougham added as a postscript: -

" I have just been copying out from my journal the account of this strange dream: Certissima mortis imago! And now to finish the story, begun about 60 years since. Soon after my return to Edinburgh, there arrived a letter from India, announcing G.'s death, and stating that he had died on the 19th of December!

"Singular coincidence! yet when one reflects on the vast numbers of dreams which night after night pass through our brains, the number of coincidences between the vision and the event are perhaps fewer and less remarkable than a fair calculation of chances would warrant us to expect. Nor is it surprising, considering the variety of our thoughts in sleep, and that they all bear some analogy to the affairs of life, that a dream should sometimes coincide with a contemporaneous or even with a future event. This is not much more wonderful than that a person, whom we had no reason to expect, should appear to us at the very moment we have been thinking or speaking of him. So common is this, that it has for ages grown into the proverb, ' Speak of the devil.' I believe every such seeming miracle is, like every ghost story, capable of explanation".

Lord Brougham's evidence in a matter of this kind cannot be fairly impugned on the ground that his character for public veracity was not always above suspicion. He clearly took no special pride or pleasure in the incident, and he advances a thoroughly rationalistic explanation of it. But of course the long interval which elapsed between his hearing of the date of the death and his recording it in writing greatly diminishes the evidential value of the case. I quote it rather for the sake of the important fallacy in the concluding remarks.

Lord Brougham, we see, rests his view that the coincidence in his case was accidental on the "vast number of dreams." But was his experience a dream? This is no mere question of a name. Let us make the supposition that no death had occurred, and that the experience remained one which there is not even a prima facie excuse for surmising to be anything but purely subjective: does it thereby subside at once into the general ruck of dream-experiences? Is it indistinguishable in intensity and character from those countless multitudes, of which it would be true and relevant to say that the scope afforded by them for chance-coincidences is practically unlimited? We can but accept what Lord Brougham himself has told us, and answer these questions by an emphatic negative. The complete consciousness of the real place and time, the intention to get out of the bath, the percipient's sense of his own actual posture when he caught sight of the figure, and the whole detail of the account, are all very unlike ordinary dreaming.

But apart from such points as these, is it a well-known result of an ordinary dream that the dreamer, on recovering his senses, finds himself " sprawling on the floor "? On waking from an ordinary dream, are we wont to remark, as a point of interest, that " the apparition has disappeared "? Is it characteristic of an ordinary dream to be so painfully vivid and unfading that the dreamer cannot bring himself to make the slightest allusion to it? Call such an experience a dream, or call it (as we should do) a "borderland" hallucination - the only relevant question is, how often does its like occur? In Lord Brougham's own long life, at any rate, it was unique and unparalleled. In arguing, therefore, that the coincidence was not so very remarkable after all, because "dreams" are so numerous and various that one of them here and there is likely by chance to strike on truth, he makes himself the slave of a word. The instance is instructive, as showing the tendency of prepossessions, however legitimate and scientific in themselves, to lead on to illegitimacies of procedure.

Lord Brougham is rightly certain that his experience is not supernatural - is "capable of explanation"; and then, as the only natural explanation that occurs to him is chance, he becomes equally certain that that must be the right one, wrests facts into conformity with it, and refers a very uncommon thing to a class of very common things.

§ 3. To come, however, to our own collection - before introducing the characteristic sensory cases, I will quote a couple of "borderland " examples of the more ideal type which has been prominent in the preceding chapters. [147 and 148 omitted here.] In the first case [147] the transferred impression (if such it was) did not even suggest an idea to the percipient until it actually took shape in an exclamation of her own.